KINGSTON – Two and a half months after filing his nomination papers, Eric Lee’s campaign to be mayor has coalesced around three key ideas, all of them culled from his own experiences.

Lee, best known as the former elevator operator at S&R Department Store and arguably the most animated of the four people vying for the mayor’s chair, is still focused on what the city can do to add more affordable housing to the city.

To help solve this, the city needs to build more affordable housing and award construction contracts to multiple companies rather than a single builder, he said.

The concentration of rental units among a few companies has created a market that many people have increasingly found unaffordable, Lee said.

“If we are going to have various locations around town where we are going to put up affordable housing, don’t award just one contract to a builder,” he said. “Don’t do one contract for three or four builds, because do you know what that means? That means monopolizing.”

Separate contracts would spur competition within the market.

Investing in new affordable places for people to live and compelling property owners to fix up existing housing stock will also benefit health, safety, environmental and civil liberty concerns, Lee said.

Lee, who described his campaign as that of a “protest candidate,” said previous mayors have done little to address the housing issue, which has become more and more critical in recent years.

“We’ve had Mark Gerretsen, Harvey Rosen and now we have Bryan Paterson, and they are all pretty much the same and I think people have started to catch on,” he said. “I think we are sending a signal that we don’t have to take this.”

Lee has also said municipal governments have to be willing to send a signal to the provincial government, too.

Lee is warning about the potential impact on Kingston of provincial government service cuts.

He said the mayor and council need to stand with other municipalities in opposition to any attempts to cut services in health care, education and environmental programs.

“The mayors, the city councils here in Kingston, Brockville, Belleville, Cornwall, we go to Queen’s Park. Let’s have a united front,” Lee said. “Let’s say to the government if they start: ‘We’re not going to take this. This is not going to balance your budgets; in fact it’s going to increase the deficits because your tax base is being eaten up by the real estate syndicates.’

“I want to get together with the other mayors, show a united front. We go in front of [Premier] Doug Ford and say, ‘No,’” he said. “Would that be successful? I don’t know, but we need to make an effort.”

Increasing the number of Queen’s University and St. Lawrence College graduates who stay in the city after completing their schooling should also be a priority for the city and the local business community, Lee said.

He said many students would stay in the city if there was work here.

“They have come to me over the years and said, ‘We love Kingston but you don’t have any jobs,’” Lee said. “This was back on the elevator, 15 years ago they were telling me this.

“Over and over and over again you get the same thing they are telling us.”

Although he has criticized much of the local business community as “chintzy and tight-fisted,” as mayor Lee said he would work to improve connections between local businesses and graduating students with the aim of keeping many of them in the city.

“Why let all this talent leave when we can have it right here in Kingston,” he said.